The EdTech sector is no longer a niche. It has become the ground on which a fundamental piece of the continent’s competitiveness – and, increasingly, its weight in the world – is being played out.

There is one number that, more than others, tells the story of where the future of nations is heading: 59%. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2030 that is the share of the global workforce that will need reskilling or upskilling to remain competitive in an economy reshaped by artificial intelligence and automation. One hundred and seventy million new jobs will be created; ninety-two million wiped out. The difference between those who will be able to ride this transition and those who will be swept away by it depends, to a very large extent, on how education systems and companies will manage the continuous updating of skills.

It is in this light – not as a technological curiosity, but as a strategic survival lever – that the Education Technology sector,EdTech, should be read. The EdTech 2026 Report by the Proxima Observatory (an organisation promoted by the human capital group Enzima12) was presented on 25 March 2026 at the Chamber of Deputies by the Observatory’s president Alberto Oddenino and coordinator Piercamillo Falasca. The presentation was attended by political representatives Giulio Centemero(Lega), Andrea Orlando (PD) and Giulia Pastorella (Azione) – three parliamentary voices that are distant in terms of political positioning, but converging on the urgency of a national strategy for digital training – together with Roberto Capobianco of Conflavoro, who brought the perspective of small and medium-sized enterprises grappling with the retraining of their human resources, and Maria Finadri of Fastweb Digital Academy, a concrete example of how an industrial operator can make training a strategic asset. A plurality of presences that, alone, says something important: EdTech has ceased to be an insider’s topic. The report offers the clearest available snapshot of a sector that has overcome the post-pandemic hangover and is entering a more selective phase, in which promises count less and the ability to transform real demand into sustainable models count more

After the euphoria, the substance

To understand where EdTech is today, one must remember where it came from. Between 2020 and 2021, the pandemic acted as a brutal accelerator: schools, universities and businesses digitised processes that would have taken years in a matter of weeks. Markets chased the wave: in 2021, global venture capital investment in the sector reached $20.8 billion, a peak reflecting the collective euphoria.

The correction was just as rapid. Global funding stood at $2.4 billion in 2024, rising again to $2.6 billion in 2025, and global spending on digital tools for education – while doubling in the post-Covid five-year period to over $400 billion – still accounts for barely 5 per cent of total educational spending. “With the hype over, the industry has entered a phase where fundamentals matter more,” the Proxima Observatory researchers write – “effectiveness, sustainability and the ability to scale without burning trust and capital.”

Europe gambles on leadership

In this global scenario, Europe occupies a peculiar and, in some ways, paradoxical position. In absolute terms, according to HolonIQ data cited in the report, capital invested in EdTech on the continent was 0.8 billion in 2024, and Europe’s relative weight in the global total has grown from 12% in 2021 to 33% in 2024.

We are facing an absolute protagonism, which must not, however, obscure the structural knot that the report clearly identifies: Europe knows how to produce rules, is consolidating a competitive advantage in a market where regulatory reliability, security and traceability count more and more, but has not yet expressed enough industrial champions.

Linguistic and cultural fragmentation – twenty-seven countries, different school systems, multiple languages of instruction – makes it difficult to scale up quickly across the continental market. And the so-called scale-up gap, denounced by the European Investment Bank, is real: Europe succeeds in financing the early stages of start-ups, but lacks the growth capital that can turn a promising company into a continental platform. When growth rounds in excess of EUR 50 million are needed, a significant part of the capital tends to come from non-European investors, with a real risk of relocation and loss of technological control.

The credibility advantage

Yet, what at first glance appears to be a weakness could turn into Europe’s main competitive advantage – provided we read it right. The Proxima Report formulates a provocative thesis: ‘Europe can compete on credibility rather than speed‘.

The reasoning is this. The AI Act imposes explicit governance and accountability requirements on all artificial intelligence systems, including those used in education. The NIS2 Directive obliges organisations to invest in cyber awareness and traceable continuing education. The GDPR sets stringent standards on the handling of student data. Together, these regulations are producing a paradoxical effect: compliance is no longer a brake on innovation, but becomes its driver. EdTech solutions that are audit-ready, interoperable and transparent are worth more on the market – and the European market, due to its size, has the strength to impose these standards beyond its borders.

It is the Brussels effect applied to education: whoever builds compliance-by-design platforms in Europe today, can export that model to the world tomorrow.

The engine of edtech is continuous training of companies

The real game, however, is played on the level of human capital. The report identifies a change of centre of gravity in the entire sector: the driving force behind EdTech is no longer primary school or university, but corporate continuing education. Corporate learning has become “a structural imperative“, no longer optional: in the US, spending on corporate training has reached $102.8 billion in the 2024-2025 biennium, with the outsourced component – technology, content, consulting – growing by 29%. In Europe, 67.4% of companies with at least ten employees are training enterprises.

The Italian cases cited in the report offer a concrete measure of this leap. Generali has consolidated its Academy into a single learning platform, investing EUR 62.5 million in training by 2024 and involving 100% of its staff with an average of 32.7 hours per capita, including an AI-infused learning programme for 1,200 senior managers. Leonardo, in the defence and aerospace sector, has built an international network of Training Academies delivering over 40,000 hours per year in VR/XR simulation environments, having trained more than 12,400 pilots and technicians. These are not isolated cases: they are the tip of an iceberg indicating that training is becoming – for large European organisations – a strategic infrastructure on a par with information systems.

Italy between momentum, delays and opportunities

In the European context, Italy embodies the contradictions of the sector better than anyone else. The School 4.0 Plan, funded with EUR 2.1 billion from the PNRR, aims to transform 100,000 classrooms into innovative learning environments. As of 30 November 2025, 24,087 schools were already connected through Infratel interventions, with a further EUR 450 million earmarked for training school staff. By 2024, the Italian EdTech ecosystem had raised 74 million in 24 rounds, reaching a 6% share of total European investments – an all-time record. Docebo, the leading Italian-based enterprise LMS, ended 2024 with revenues of $216.9 million, 94% of which came from recurring subscriptions.

But the numbers also tell the other side. Only 45.9% of Italians aged between 16 and 74 have at least basic digital skills. The use of AI in businesses, while growing rapidly (from 8.2% in 2024 to 16.4% in 2025), remains well below the European average of 20%. And the fragility of the education system in the face of cyber threats is alarming: according to Check Point Research, in the first seven months of 2025 Italy recorded an average of 8,593 weekly cyber attacks per organisation in the education sector – 82% more than the previous year, and well above the global average of 4,356.

Ideas in search of a market

There is a way to measure the real temperature of an industry that does not come through press releases or analysts’ aggregate data: look directly at the start-ups trying to solve it. The second part of the Proxima Report does exactly that. 12Venture, the startup study of the Enzima12 ecosystem, analysed and evaluated 388 EdTech and HRTech companies along multiple dimensions – from pitch decks to product hypotheses, from revenue models to technology trajectories. This is not a forecasting exercise. It is, in the words of the researchers, a reading of the industry’s ‘animal spirits’: the insights that catalyse talent and capital, the weak signals that anticipate turning points.

The picture that emerges is that of a lively and, in some ways, surprisingly widespread ecosystem. Geographically speaking, it is true that the main urban poles – Milan in the lead, followed by Rome – concentrate the largest share of Italian initiatives. But the mapping also returns an unexpected and encouraging signal: innovation is born everywhere. Start-ups active in the south of the country, in medium-sized cities, in seemingly peripheral contexts show that distance from major hubs is no longer, in itself, an insurmountable obstacle to the birth of quality ideas. The real challenge is not where ideas are born, but whether the capital, networks and skills needed to make them grow will be able to reach them before they die out. If the ecosystem knows how to build bridges between consolidated innovation centres and emerging realities – through distributed acceleration programmes, mentorship networks and more widespread access to credit – even the South and the smaller territories will be able to stop being the periphery of Italian EdTech and become its new protagonists in the future.

An analysis of the pitch decks reveals some transversal trends. The most crowded segment is that of professional training and corporate learning, where regulatory pressure – from the AI Act to NIS2 – has created a structural demand that large companies are unable to satisfy entirely with internal resources. There is a growing number of start-ups focusing on generative artificial intelligence not as an ancillary functionality, but as an infrastructural layer: conversational tutors, automatic generators of training content, adaptive assessment tools. Rarer, but more valuable, is the profile of start-ups that natively integrate compliance, traceability and interoperability requirements by design – what the report defines as compliance-by-design – because they are the only ones able to respond to the more sophisticated demands of large organisations.

Some of these 388 ideas will not survive, others will struggle, but some will grow, consolidate partnerships and establish themselves. The real utility of this mapping is not predictive: it is heuristic. It serves to understand where talent and capital are being concentrated, which product hypotheses are becoming industrial models.

The geopolitics of learning

Finally, there is a dimension of the problem that tends to be underestimated in the public debate, and which the Proxima Report names with an effective formula: gentle geopolitics. Those who control educational platforms increasingly control student data, learning trajectories, and assessment models. Google and Microsoft have distributed free suites to schools all over the world: a gesture of ‘generosity’ that inevitably brings with it an issue of educational sovereignty and technological dependence.

Europe has a choice in front of it: let standardisation become an oligopoly of the big American platforms, or build a competitive and modular ecosystem based on interoperability and data portability. The answer is not digital protectionism, but the construction of credible alternatives – open standards, minimum transparency requirements, public-private solutions capable of reducing dependency without closing to innovation. In this game, educational cooperation with developing countries – where EdTech can bridge huge gaps in access to education – itself becomes an instrument of influence and geopolitical stability.

The maturity triptych

The Proxima Report identifies three conditions that define the maturity threshold of EdTech in the next three years: control (knowing how to govern technology and data), responsibility (taking on roles and consequences), and trust (built with evidence and transparency). This is not an abstract formula. It is a description of what is needed for educational innovation to be scalable, sustainable and socially legitimate.

Europe has the rules. It has institutions. It has values – education as a common good, inclusion as a priority – that set it apart from the American and Chinese models. What it still lacks is the ability to turn all this into industrial platforms, into global champions, into a capital market deep enough to take the best ideas to the continental scale.

2026 is the first year of a new cycle. Who will be able to seize this window – investors, governments, entrepreneurs and educational institutions – will help decide whether tomorrow’s classroom will be equipped to compete.